Thursday, February 11, 2010

There are a lot of people out there that think the Moon landing was a hoax. I'm sure you can find someone that genuinely thinks that the world is the center of the universe. Global warming/climate change is just one in a plethora of phenomena that science has described in its brief history. Why would anyone deny it?

Simple.

Most people have never seen the evidence. None of us has seen it all: it's taken climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, botanists, meteorologists, etc, working in concert to fully understand it. Most importantly, why not deny it? Has anyone--including Al Gore--given up the instruments that make this "inconvenient truth," so terribly inconvenient?

Scientists aren't prophets. It is incumbent on science to describe the facts in such a way that those who haven't the background to understand a least-squares regression or a p-value, can somehow connect the dots. To be fair, many attempts at this have been thwarted by commercial and religious interests, spending billions on obfuscation campaigns.

Buying into a cigarette company's claim that their product doesn't cause cancer is arguably stupid, but it does not follow that lighting up, against the advice of the Surgeon General, makes you a bad American. Bill Nye undermines the premise of Maddow's entire argument by concluding that a failure to yield to science is unpatriotic. This is as ludicrous as the claim that a week of heavy snow disproves decades of evidence on climate change.

Nye brought a political hack's weapons to a scientist's fight. In science, we win arguments with facts, not hyperbole. Shrouding science in mystery and demonizing its critics--however foolish their arguments--makes it indistinguishable from religion.